Wild Horses

This Emmy-award winning documentary chronicles the journey of a mustang named Charlie and the people whose lives he touches along the way. Produced and written by Jen Noble. Distributed nationally on PBS, a WTCI-TV Production, Chattanooga, TN.

In Cloud’s Legacy: The Wild Stallion Returns, Cloud is now a band stallion with a mare and her children, a yearling and a foal. Meanwhile, Cloud’s own child, which has a telltale golden coat, lives with another herd and will never know him as his father. This film premiered November 23, 2003.

With the American mustang crisis in the news worldwide, award-winning filmmaker, James Anaquad-Kleinert brings his star- studded environmental film, Wild Horses & Renegades to National attention. In the ﬁlm, Willie Nelson, Sheryl Crow, Viggo Mortense, Raoul Trujillo, Daryl Hannah and Dances with Wolves author Michael Blake join with former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson and Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) to highlight how the great symbol of the American West is being purposefully driven to extinction by a corrupt Bureau of Land Management. The documentary captures the corporate beneﬁts of wild horse roundups, including clearing land for Uranium mining claims, oil and gas pipelines and corporate cattle grazing. As Jim Baca (former Director of the Bureau of Land Management) states in Wild Horses & Renegades: “Our Public Lands are run by the oil, mining and livestock industries and it’s their way or the highway”.

Ranchers in Wyoming and elsewhere graze livestock on federal lands across the West and are charged a grazing fee ($1.35 per Animal Unit Month) that is a fraction of market rate. The public lands grazing program operates at a staggering loss to taxpayers, who pay $125 million annually in grazing subsidies – or more than $1 billion over the past decade, according to a new report released this week. Ranchers see federally-protected wild horses as competition for cheap, subsidized grazing on public lands and are increasingly vocal in demanding their removal.

The horses who died in BLM holding pens were rounded up by helicopter from public lands in the West and stripped of their freedom and families. After being held for several years in feedlot pens, they were trucked off to holding pastures in the Midwest, only to be rounded up and sentenced again to feedlot-like conditions. The trauma and stress apparently caused the deaths of at least 57 of the horses.

The Foundation to Protect New Mexico Wildlife today announced it has formalized an agreement with the Navajo Nation to develop a comprehensive and humane program to manage the thousands of free-roaming horses on the reservation. The ultimate goal of the agreement is to develop alternatives to transporting the horses to slaughter facilities.

Despite three years of drought and the worst drought on record hitting western states, the BLM continues to allow private livestock to graze on public lands where wild horses are facing extreme range conditions.Within designated HMAs, the BLM allocates over 82 percent of forage to privately-owned livestock and less than 18 percent of forage to federally-protected wild horses.

The Wild Free Roaming Horses and Burros Act (Public Law 92-195) protects wild horses from “capture, branding, harassment or death.” The BLM cannot conduct a roundup of federally-protected wild horses in the absence of full legal disclosure and analysis required under the Wild Horse Act and National Environmental Policy Act. Under the Wild Horse Act, the BLM is mandated to protect wild horses, while livestock grazing on public lands is authorized entirely at the discretion of the Interior Department pursuant to the Taylor Grazing Act.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) helicopter roundup of Wyoming’s Salt Wells wild horses in the snow and cold is over, but the inhumane treatment of the over 668 captive mustangs is continuing according to eyewitnesses to both the roundup and the corralling of the horses.

Under the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act of 1971, the BLM is responsible for managing and preserving wild horses and burros around the country. Over the past few decades, BLM has used a number of controversial management techniques to meet herd quotas required by the law. Approximately 39,000 wild horses and burros roam land managed by the BLM and another 40,000 more are held in BLM facilities like Palomino Valley — the largest holding facility managed by the federal government.

The report sheds new light on the BLM’s Fiscal Year 2014 budget request, which continues the agency’s practice of spending nearly 70 percent of the wild horse program budget to roundup, remove and stockpile horses and less than 4 percent on in-the-wild management, including fertility control, to keep wild horses on the range. This approach forces a crisis in which 50,000, or 3 out of 5, wild horses live in government warehouses, costing taxpayers $120,000 a day just to feed the stockpiled horses. The BLM program cost taxpayers $80 million last year.